Cellular automata are widely used to model natural or artificial systems.
Classically they are run with perfect synchrony, i.e., the local rule is
applied to each cell at each time step. A possible modification of the updating
scheme consists in applying the rule with a fixed probability, called the
synchrony rate. For some particular rules, varying the synchrony rate
continuously produces a qualitative change in the behaviour of the cellular
automaton. We investigate the nature of this change of behaviour using
Monte-Carlo simulations. We show that this phenomenon is a second-order phase
transition, which we characterise more specifically as belonging to the
directed percolation or to the parity conservation universality classes studied
in statistical physics